Immobilized

It is difficult for a Hawaiian to be prissy, but then she wasn't, was she?  She was a Japanese-American and had matters thoroughly under control at American Airlines gate 17.  There were rules.  Wheelchairs and airplanes fit together in a certain way, and this was all above discussion.  Everyone knew.  The batteries had to be disconnected.

Ask her American Airlines opposite at the departing gate in San Francisco and you'll get an entirely different response.  No one needs to disconnect sealed, dry cell batteries, she said with a wave of her gate-agent hand.  So we were off for Honolulu where my wheelchair rolled to the door of the airplane fully electrified and fully intact. 

My goal was very much the same now for the return journey.  Get the wheelchair loaded, safely, and minimize the screwing about upon arrival in San Francisco.  The latter includes reconnecting batteries in a hard-to-reach box.  This is physically difficult for Marlou and challenges the hardiest baggage guy.  Which brings us back to this delicate moment at Honolulu airport.  There was the gate agent looming behind her podium.  There was the Boeing 757.  Here was I.  When in doubt, head for the toilets.  Afterward, I rolled back to Marlou and hoped that the matter had been forgotten, more or less, and in the frenzy of boarding, the matter of battery disconnecting might just get overlooked.

The baggage guy who followed us to the airplane seemed quite sympathetic.  I showed him the electrical tape on the wire leading to the joystick controller and strongly suggested that screwing about with my wheelchair's batteries was like performing heart surgery on someone who had just had a kidney transplant.  The electrical tape marked the site of a previous insult to common sense...the handiwork of our good friends at Firenze airport.  Nevermind.  We have tilled this exhausted ground elsewhere in my blog.  For now, I am rolling to the airplane door, chatting up a storm with this affable fellow and warning him for a second time about the electrical tape.  After Firenze, I tell him, hearing the epochal ring of this...like after 9/11 or after Gallipoli...I had a simple choice between electrical tape with a quick patch job or the purchase of a $1000 joystick controller.  He laughed pleasantly.  A no-brainer, we both agreed.  I left him with the chair, crutched my way to row 11 and found Marlou there and no one else.  We had an empty seat, a spacious twosome, not an elbow-crowding threesome.  And my wheelchair was on its way. 

But not quite.  The baggage man reappeared in a moment to show Marlou how he had disconnected the batteries.  She got off for a look and had a confab.  The man had disconnected a cable in the back, marking one end with a bit of tape.  Which sounded okay. 

Naturally, it wasn't.  A small crowd assembled around my wheelchair in the arriving jetway at San Francisco.  Several flight attendants, the pilot and in the end, an actual airline mechanic.  It was the latter who showed me the broken wires.  Two of five had been snapped.  Something in me snapped too.  It was a Friday.  Wheelchair repair is not available on weekends -- this is a rule of life.  A Filipino wheelchair pusher got behind my 200 pound electric chair and shoved me and two lead batteries uphill and into the terminal.  His partner, Vladimir, carried a couple of bags.  An hour later, the three of us stood in the chill San Francisco night and waited for the special, very special, wheelchair van to take me home. 

The trip had tired me, and going through the wheelchair-damage-claim process had drained me.  And now Vladimir was arguing, for the second time in the previous 30 minutes.  The van dispatch woman was telling him what to do.  Twenty minutes earlier the airline baggage woman was telling him what to do.  And Vladimir wasn't having any of it.  He was not Russian, correcting his Filipino counterpart, but Armenian.  I now understood.  He came from a long line of arguers.  We had been at the airport for 2 1/2 hours.  Our attendants, each in his 70s, hung with us to the bitter end.  The van driver was naturally Palestinian.  He was full of complaints, and one couldn't blame him.  The man had been orbiting the airport for 90 minutes looking for the guy in the wheelchair, which turned out to be broken and delaying everyone and everything.  I stared into the night sky.

In our apartment, the thermostat read a very un-California 52°.  I was that age once.  Now I was a decade older.  I still had considerable determination, but less and less proprioception, the neurological ability to locate one's limbs in space.  And now I was in my space, the home space, and I was feeling pretty spacey.  Understand that at the heart of this drama lies a wheelchair control, consisting of a simple joystick on the order of an old Atari game, five simple chips with an approximate street value of $1.86, one stainless steel arm and a highly inadequate cable terminating in a cheap plug.  All available for a mere $1000 direct from the supplier.  Marlou's advice: you pay them now or you pay them later.  I am sure there is a difference between heroin dealers and wheelchair manufacturers, but the distinction is subtle.

Marlou had turned on the heat even before she turned on the lights, and things were warming nicely.  Hot air blew about our living room just as it has since the 1950s when the heater was installed.  For every BTU that entered, two or three escaped through the uninsulated walls.  Each winter I swear I'm going to do something about this situation.  And now it's midwinter and the situation is upon us, and I have other fish to fry.  Principal among the frying is the absence of a wheelchair.  I hobble into the kitchen, drink some water, lean my crutch against the counter and fill the tea kettle for tomorrow's breakfast.  This is one of my jobs.  I make tea, Marlou drinks it, then other things happen.  Actually, my job includes tea delivery, but without my power wheelchair that job responsibility is out.  I cannot carry simple objects without the wheelchair.  I can't do much of anything, truth be told, except hold the crutch grip with my one working hand, try to stay upright as my physical therapist suggests and hurl one spastic foot in front of the other.

Life continues in this fashion.  On wheelchairless day two, Marlou gets out the folding model.  She pushes me about in this wheelchair now and then.  But it's mostly then, for it's hard going over our thick carpet.  It's actually easier to push a wheelchair through an Irish bog than to effect a right turn on our acrylic.  All this must be straining Marlou.  It is straining me.  With cancer looming large in our relationship, neither of us has the reserves for extra challenges.  I know the current situation can depress me beyond its true proportion.  There are too many reminders.  I spent six months in a push wheelchair in 1968, and the experience is still fresh.  Still, this is just temporary.  I will be on a battery-powered roll soon enough, but it doesn't feel that way.  Maintaining perspective will be hard.

With Marlou pushing the wheelchair now and then and me crutching around the rest of the time, things get done.  In the mornings, I get the lights on and hike across the carpet, crutch clicking, to make our tea.  It's a short trip into the bathroom.  Crutching to the office is no big deal.  I roll up to the table for some meals, sit elsewhere for others.  We even visit friends in Berkeley.

On wheelchairless day three, Marlou dozes in the sun.  The December light is fleeting but warming.  Marlou's back has been bothering her.  She needs to call her doctor's office for several reasons but hasn't.  I don't blame her for being immobilized.  I would be in a very similar state.  Marlou looks up from the sofa and says that she can see how difficult it will be to do anything with less and less energy.  I concede she is correct.  Still, human energy is a strange thing.  No one knows exactly where it comes from or even what it is. 

These have been a sobering few days for me.  With the wheelchair out of action, my disabled state is stripped bare.  I can walk short distances, with a wobbly and not very safe gait.  I cannot take anything from one room to another unless I hold it in my teeth, which I occasionally do, revealing how something dangling from my mouth, say, a magazine, throws off my spatial sense, making the balance problem even worse.

We need help.  We will need help as Marlou's cancer progresses.  We even need help now.  The days without the wheelchair have brought home to me my limitations.  Yet they have reminded me of my general resilience and of Marlou's.  I can see now in this moment something that can easily be overlooked, taken for granted.  I married someone with abundant courage.  Marlou would rather know what's happening.  And so, it seems, would I.